He left his seat in the house, gathered his forces, and chased that clerical army for two months. At last, dead weary, the clericals had camped for supper, when Diaz romped in and thrashed them. He got that supper.
So disgusted were the clerical leaders that they now invited Napoleon III to send an army of invasion. Undismayed, the unfortunate liberals fought a joint army of French and clericals, checked them under the snows of Mount Orizaba, and so routed them before the walls of Puebla that it was nine months before they felt well enough to renew the attack. The day of that victory is celebrated by the Mexicans as their great national festival.
In time, the French, forty thousand strong, not to mention their clerical allies, returned to the assault of Puebla, and in front of the city found Diaz commanding an outpost. The place was only a large rest-house for pack-trains, and when the outer gate was carried, the French charged in with a rush. One man remained to defend the courtyard, Colonel Diaz, with a field-piece, firing shrapnel, mowing away the French in swathes until his people rallied from their panic, charged across the square, and recovered the lost gates.
The city held out for sixty days, but succumbed to famine, and the French could not persuade such a man as Diaz to give them any parole. They locked him up in a tower, and his dungeon had but a little iron-barred window far up in the walls. Diaz got through those bars, escaped, rallied a handful of Mexicans, armed them by capturing a French convoy camp, raised the southern states of Mexico, and for two years held his own against the armies of France.
President Juarez had been driven away into the northern desert, a fugitive, the Emperor Maximilian reigned in the capital, and Marshal Bazaine commanded the French forces that tried to conquer Diaz in the south. The Mexican hero had three thousand men and a chain of forts. Behind that chain of forts he was busy reorganizing the government of the southern states, and among other details, founding a school for girls in his native city.
Marshal Bazaine, the traitor, who afterward sold France to the Germans, attempted to bribe Diaz, but, failing in that, brought nearly fifty thousand men to attack three thousand. Slowly he drove the unfortunate nationalists to Oaxaca and there Diaz made one of the most glorious defenses in the annals of war. He melted the cathedral bells for cannon-balls, he mounted a gun in the empty belfry, where he and his starving followers fought their last great fight, until he stood alone among the dead, firing charge after charge into the siege lines.
Once more he was cast into prison, only to make such frantic attempts at escape that in the end he succeeded in scaling an impossible wall. He was an outlaw now, living by robbery, hunted like a wolf, and yet on the second day after that escape, he commanded a gang of bandits and captured a French garrison. He ambuscaded an expedition sent against him, raised an army, and reconquered Southern Mexico.
Porfirio Diaz
It was then (1867) that the United States compelled the French to retire. President Juarez marched from the northern deserts, gathering the people as he came, besieged Querétaro, captured and shot the Emperor Maximilian. Diaz marched from the south, entered the City of Mexico, handed over the capital to his triumphant president, resigned his commission as commander-in-chief, and retired in deep contentment to manufacture sugar in Oaxaca.